


What Do P-Ratings Mean? (Part 3, aka Shhh - Telepathy Is Complicated)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [76]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Crawford-Tokash Act, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, How canon misled you, Law, Politics, Psi Cops, Psi Corps, Telepath Law (Babylon 5), Telepath War, Telepath culture, The Corps Was Right, The Psi Corps tag is mine, What do P-ratings mean?, Worldbuilding, shameless self-insertion, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2019-01-09 08:35:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12272781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: How does telepathy work?Well, like theHeinsenberg compensator: "Just fine, thank you."Actually... it's complicated.But don't tell anyone, OK?Before you read this chapter, please readP-ratings for n00bs, latent through P5, andP-ratings for n00bs, P5 through P11- at least the first part, so you know what I'm talking about.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	What Do P-Ratings Mean? (Part 3, aka Shhh - Telepathy Is Complicated)

**Author's Note:**

> This essay is inspired by the "ask" at my Ask Blog [here](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com).
> 
> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!

Under all of canon's talk of _ratings_ , the truth is that telepathy is actually complicated, and telepathic ability isn't comprised of just "one thing."

Yes, there is the aptitude that can be measured and rated (P whatever), but what actually happens is more complicated than that.

  * "How it works" is actually more complicated than "Proximity!" and "Line of Sight!"


  * "Intuition," in all its many forms, still exists, and anyone can have that, whether legally a "normal" or a "telepath."


  * And then, there's politics.



First, a few bits from canon to illustrate this, and then I'm going to tell you all what this means.

**********

Deadly Relations, p. 99-100. Bester (fourteen years old) and his mentor, Sandoval Bey, are in Amsterdam, looking for a student who has run away from school (Fatima Cristoban):

"She was here," Bey said, surveying the dingy little room. "Not long ago."

Al felt it, too, the vague imprint of Cristoban's psyche. It didn't belong here, in this narrow space, on that wretched tiny bed. It belonged - _out_ somewhere, with a wide sky. He thought back to her file, which he had reviewed on the helicopter ride. She was from Argentina. Was it a spacious place?

He shook the feeling off. Ever since he had "prepared" himself with the photograph, it was as if a ghost hung near his shoulders, entering his eyes now and then and rendering them alien. Was it possible that he was actually in touch with the Blip somehow? Sharing her actual thoughts? He asked Bey.

Bey was still walking slowly around the room, as if surveying each molecule in it. He didn't look at Al.

"I don't know," he replied simply. "Telepathy and distance are very strange things. Once, in the Belt, a construction worker went missing. We didn't find him for hours, and when we did it was first with radar and then with a telescope. He was in an EVA suit, twenty miles away, drifting. No response from his comlink, nothing. All of the shuttles were out, but we knew we could rig up a sled in pretty short order - if it was worth it. They asked me if I could tell whether he was alive or dead. He was a little dot in the sky, but once I established line of sight, I had him. I scanned him, and he was alive, though unconscious. Turns out it was attempted murder, but that's a longer story. Twenty miles and clear as a bell. I even got who the would-be killer was from him, then and there. We had him detained before the sled even rescued the castaway.

"On the other hand, I've been unable to pull surface thoughts from someone hiding in a closet ten feet away." He paused. "I know they teach line of sight, but I could tell you some stories-" He looked at Al, finally. "It comes down to this: We still don't know exactly how telepathy works. I sometimes wonder if its limitations aren't more psychosomatic or perceptual than anything else. Why else should I be able to scan someone twenty miles away, simply because I can see a tiny silver dot?"

"So it's possible I might have established some link with her?"

"I wouldn't count on it. It's more likely closure - your mind putting things together from a number of facts and sensations. Your memory of her signature, the traces of her left in this room, the details you know about her - the Human mind is a strange machine, even without telepathy. The main thing, Mr. Bester, is that it _works_. 'Why' is usually a fine question to ask, but in this case-" He stopped, smiling. "Have you ever seen the animated vids?"

"Yes. I used to like _Roadrunner_."

"Hmm - the roadrunner was the Blip, right? And the coyote, the Psi Cop?"

"Yes, sir. The roadrunner was clever, but he always got caught in the end."

"Did he ever run off of a cliff, and not know it? Just hang there in the air until he realized that he wasn't standing on anything?"

"Yes, sir. That's when he would fall."

"Sometimes our abilities are like that. Convince yourself that something shouldn't work, and sometimes it doesn't."

"In that case, sir, I'd like to tell you something I really shouldn't know."

"What's that, Mr. Bester?"

"She's out in a park, somewhere, or a field. Someplace open."

Bey nodded thoughtfully. "Well. An intuition. And you may be right - that may be where she _wants_ to be. That's very different from knowing where she is."

"Yes, sir."

**********

Bey turns out to be right - Fatima Cristoban is very much not in an open field. Either that's where she wanted to be, as Bey speculates, or that's where Bester's unconscious mind put her (he had met her in person earlier, so he wasn't making all this up just from looking at a photograph). But either way, no, she's not there.

Also interesting is that Bester and Bey - both P12s - are able to feel that Fatima was recently in that room, but "how" isn't actually understood, by anyone, including them.

  * Are Psi Cops able to sense if someone's recently been in the room? _Sometimes._



In school, as Bey says, they teach about line of sight - because it's "predictable." It's easy to teach, to both normals and telepaths alike: If you've got line of sight on someone, even very far away, you can scan them! And proximity! Yay! That's easy to understand, even if it's not always how it works.

Most normals know next to nothing about telepaths, even Psi Cops. They know business teeps "keep business honest" and they know Psi Cops "keep them safe from rogues," and as a general matter, that's all they  _need_ to know. There's not much reason to get into anything beyond that - and doing so could even be dangerous.

Still, actual telepaths know it's really not cut and dry, bright line, all or nothing, black and white. Nothing with the human mind ever is.

Perhaps Bey should have explained it thus:

_“On the other hand, I've been unable to pull surface thoughts from someone hiding in a closet ten feet away." He paused. "I know they teach line of sight and proximity, but I could tell you some stories-" He looked at Al finally. "It comes down to this: We still don’t know exactly how telepathy works. I sometimes wonder if its limitations aren’t more psychosomatic or perceptual than anything else. Why else should I be able to scan someone twenty miles away, simply because I can see a tiny silver dot? Have you ever had a lucid dream, Mr. Bester?”_

_Al nodded._

_“Sometimes in dreams, we become aware that we’re dreaming. We should be able to do anything – fly, walk through walls, anything we like. But often we can’t, because our dream eyes deceive us. I told you about the Blip I couldn’t detect, only ten feet away. I couldn’t see or hear her. And I couldn’t feel her thoughts, either, because on a subconscious level, my mind couldn’t process that she was there.”_

Telepathy is, to a large degree, unconscious and automatic. For surface thought telepaths, "trying" to know what someone's thinking usually doesn't produce any results, but awareness of others' thoughts nonetheless happens anyway when they're _not trying_ (see [Chapter 2 of John's first story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10268429/chapters/22741814) for an example of this, and there are more examples throughout that story and in other stories). Once you become aware of what's going on, and start _trying_ , it may stop working - and we're back to the Roadrunner analogy.

Plop.

YMMV. (This is about thoughts, also, not about strong emotions - that's different.)

Line of sight helps a lot, but even with line of sight, "trying" is likely to get you nowhere.

Higher rated telepaths (those who can consciously scan others) can also run into issues with this - for any telepath, if you don't have line of sight on someone, your mind can play tricks on you, and you can unconsciously expect something _not_ to work - which makes it not work.

  * Can Psi Cops sense rogues behind a wall, with no line of sight, and no ability to hear them? _Sometimes._



You can see now why this isn't talked about outside the Corps. Telepathy is poorly understood, and _complicated_ , and normals generally have little time or patience for that. They need reassurances that Psi Cops can do their jobs and keep them safe, rain or shine, _no matter what_. That telepathy is complicated is _not_ the image the Corps wants to project to mundanes - the safety of all telepaths depends on it.

Protecting telepaths from another round of deadly pogroms,  _by mundanes_ , is of the highest importance in the Corps, and that safety depends on mundanes thinking everything is simple and believing that the Corps, no matter what, can keep them safe. This is a broader principal, of course, and applies to all Corps/normal public interactions, but it applies here as well. This adherence to a strict "party line" about telepathy even extends to what's taught in Corps schools, to telepaths themselves - Bey wasn't raised in the Corps (he didn't enter the Corps till he was a teenager) so he has fewer political hangups about admitting the truth to his students. It's part of what makes him such an excellent teacher.

  * It's a hard thing to admit, outside of safe ears: **"Sometimes Psi Cops fuck up not because they're incompetent, but because _telepathy is a human mental faculty and not fucking magic._ "**



That's not something anyone wants to be explaining to mundanes, especially with public safety on the line.

Psi Cops are _never_ supposed to "fuck up," whatever the reason.

Mundanes also generally don't care about how telepathy works, as long as it suits their needs. As Sen. Rosaki, the chair of the Senate Committee on Metasensory Abilities [says to her new aide, Dylan Valle](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10751193/chapters/23837547):

            “Mr. Valle, I don’t trust any telepath, it’s nothing personal against you. As much as I believe you are sincere – you would not be sitting here if I did not – I simply cannot ever trust you completely. Am I clear?”

            “Yes ma’am.”

“It’s the job of this office to oversee telepath policy, not to get cozy with telepaths. So if, as you say, your telepathy does not have an ‘on/off button,’ it’s your responsibility to make sure that it does, or move aside and let someone more qualified take this job.”

            She was asking him to do the impossible. No telepaths had that kind of “control” – telepathy simply didn’t work like that. Even without intentionally scanning anyone, surface thoughts always came through from time to time, especially when accompanied by strong emotion. He wondered how the senator could have so much power over telepaths, and yet know – or care – so little about them."

**********

To the normal public, if Psi Cops can't perform their duties, then it's up to them to step aside and let someone else do their job, someone who can. Even if this makes _no sense_.

And these same background politics with normals are why Bester, raised in Cadre Prime - who has been telepathic since birth - _has not been taught the complete picture in school about how telepathy works_ , especially the bits that can't be neatly "explained." Corps schools self-censor like hell, even about something as basic as "how telepathy works," because in this case, there is a political implication. Telepathy has to be presented as working in predictable ways, infallibly, because that's the line "for normal consumption."

(The Corps is, remember, an agency of EarthGov, run by a mundane director, and overseen by a committee of the EA Senate.)

It took an outsider by birth - Bey - to explain it to him.

**********

The scene above isn't the only moment in canon when telepathy is described in a more complex, non-linear fashion. Kevin Vacit talks about intuition in Dark Genesis:

"We spend so much time here teaching you to deal with other telepaths, we forget the more ancient forms of mind reading. The late Senator Crawford - now there was a man who could read minds, though he had no trace of telepathic ability. Until my forced display in Yucatán, even the most powerful telepaths failed to detect me, nor did I really fear that they would. Crawford, I worried about." (Dark Genesis, p. 184)

Final Reckoning also references these "ancient forms" of intuition (which seems to be how people in that universe reference all intuition that doesn't fit the definition of "legal telepathy"). There is more to "how it works" than ratings: "Ratings" are, remember, themselves a _mundane invention_ , imposed on telepaths, a convenient shorthand for _mundanes_ to be able to categorize telepaths and sort them into the "best jobs" for them (to serve normals), with the Corps acting as a "clearinghouse."[1] Telepaths never "rated" each other _anywhere on Earth_ until Crawford and his cronies came up with that idea. (I have mixed feelings about ratings, personally - they're simultaneously _useful as fuck_ and _oppressive as fuck_. It's Complicated.)

Here's the passage that talks about intuition:

          "There was an old exercise for picturing how gravity worked. You imagine space as a sheet of rubber, extending in all directions. You put a ball bearing on the sheet, and it creates a small dimple. You place a cannonball on the sheet, and it makes a large one. Place the ball bearing near enough to the cannonball, and it rolls down the large dimple to join the cannonball. The lesson is that mass warps space, and that the "attraction" of gravity is merely a by-product of that warping.

          "Bester had long ago used that same visualization to think about telepathy, with the ball bearings and cannonballs and what-have-you representing minds. A normal made a tiny dimple, a P12 a deep one. But it was more complicated than that. The older a telepath got, the more experience he acquired, and the more he learned from his instincts, the stronger his telepathic gravity became and the more the plane of thought curved around him. The deeper his imprint became, so to speak.

          "At the same time, he became more and more sensitive to other perturbations on the imaginary rubber sheet. Yes, real telepathy, the transfer of coherent ideas from one mind to another, depended upon proximity and, ideally, line of sight. But there were older senses that telepathy could engage, senses that worked below the level of rational thought." (Final Reckoning, p. 212)

And those "older senses," as he describes it, and experiences it, are comprised of many different intuitions.

 _Certain_ telepaths have _certain_ enhanced faculties because the Vorlons were tinkering with human DNA (though only 70% carry the gene, and many normals and latents carry the gene also). But this doesn't mean that everything else that existed in human mental faculties before that tinkering has changed at all, let alone disappeared. All of that still exists - and it's independent of who is a "normal" or a "telepath." For telepaths, it's even synergistic.

It's just not talked about very much because "telepath" has moved from a descriptive umbrella category, to a _social and political_ category (and a narrow, specific one at that), even a [social caste](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10292036). So the ways people think about talk about telepathy have also changed over time accordingly.

There is "telepathy" and there are "older senses." OK.

  * Are some normals _damn good_ at knowing who's lying? Sure. Several such people are described in canon (e.g. Senator Lee Crawford and Inspector Raphael Girard). They're 100% normals. Sometimes, there are normals who are better at detecting lies than telepaths are! Not all telepaths are high-rated, not all telepaths have good (let alone excellent) social skills, and telepaths are human beings who sometimes get distracted and miss things. (But don't tell anyone that, because the EA economy depends on the fiction that telepaths are living "lie detector machines.")


  * Are some normals able to tell when their close friends and family are lying? Sure, because that never changed at all.


  * Do both normals and telepaths have various forms of "intuition"? Sure, and that's what Bester is talking about above.


  * And since this one happens to Ivanova: Do normals still sometimes have experiences such as we might (in this world) call "telepathy" - e.g. feeling when a loved one tragically and suddenly dies, far away? Sure. That experience actually has nothing to do with her being a latent telepath - that can happen to anyone.


  * But isn't that "telepathy"?



That's a political question.

Remember, "telepath" status is a legal creation, reified in Earth Alliance law. It's actually about the money - at its heart, the reasons for defining "telepaths" the way the law does, and shoving said telepaths into a separate "caste," are about economic exploitation - keeping them out of most jobs (so as not to compete with normals), and forcing them to take only jobs that directly or indirectly benefit normals socially and economically. It's about control. (Pssst - that's the Earth Alliance Senate, not the Corps, we're talking about.)

The mundane politicians and policymakers knew nothing about Vorlon influence when they made these laws. It was all about normal control, normal power, and normal money. And it always is. These very same Earth Alliance laws that define telepaths and mandate "universal registration" of telepaths in enormous databases don't change  _at all_ after the Telepath War. Some surface changes took place, but nothing deep, nothing structural, and nothing lasting. (All that bloodshed, but nothing changed - because telepaths were fighting _each other_ instead of normals.)

So what Ivanova experienced when her brother died... those kinds of "intuitive" experiences are impossible to "quantify," to predict, to commodify, to _commercialize_ \- so EA law says no.

"Not telepathy."

...

...

...

I told you telepathy is complicated.

 

[1] JMS’ own words, July 17, 1994 (as quoted on a card in the collectable card game): “About 125 years or so ago in B5’s timeline (2100-2110 and thereabouts), full-blown telepaths began to be discovered. About 2150 or so, the government agencies that regulated and oversaw telepaths were rolled over into the Psi Corps, which became a clearing house [sic] for locating, controlling, and licensing telepaths for commercial, some very restricted legal, and military purposes.”


End file.
